Diamond Shoal in Greens Winslow Homer Poster 20X30 Art Print

Diamond Shoal....
Reefing Sails Cape Hatteras in Greens
Winslow Homer
1905

Description of Original: Watercolor
35.2cm X 55.3 cm
Location: Private Collection

Diamond Shoal was the last watercolor that Homer signed and dated, and might be the last one he painted. Broad brushes of blue and green create a dramatic mood as the seamen drop the flying jib to the bowsprit and hoist the mizzen sail to point the bow into the wind. The mainsail has been hurredly lowered as they frantically trim the staysail. Our vantage point is as if we were actually in the water as the sailboat races towards us. In the background is the Diamond Shoals Lightship which was moored thirteen miles off the tip of Hatteras.

Winslow Homer (February 24, 1836 September 29, 1910)

An American landscape painter and printmaker, best known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost painters in 19th century America and a preeminent figure in American art.

Largely self-taught, Homer began his career working as a commercial illustrator. As a youth, Homer was apprenticed to a publisher of popular lithographic prints. In 1857 he launched his career as an illustrator, moving to New York City two years later; there, he attended drawing classes at the prestigious National Academy of Design and briefly studied painting privately. During the Civil War, he went south with the Union troops as an artist-reporter for the magazine Harpers Weekly.

After the war, Homer turned to oil painting. His first works in this medium were wartime scenes that attracted attention for their simple power and lack of sentimentality; their critical success helped gain him election to the National Academy at the age of twenty-nine.

His paintings of subjects ranging from fashionable seasonal resorts to rural childhood as well as African American life in the south broke new ground in their naturalism, directness, and rejection of obvious narrative, and revealed his exceptional command of natural light. In 1873, during a summer spent at the fishing port of Gloucester, Massachusetts, he began to work seriously in watercolor, of which he became a master.